While there was a mention of how easy killer Wayne Lo said it was to get the gun he used to kill student Galen Gibson, 18, and teacher Ñacuñán Sáez, 37, and wound several others, including Thomas McElderry, then 19, of New York Mills, Minn., there was nothing on the episode about Lo’s beliefs. He wrote a class paper arguing that people with AIDS should be banished to Utah. Other students said he hated Jews, blacks and homosexuals, and claimed the Holocaust never happened, the NY Times reported at the time.

Not mentioned either was the fact that some of the survivors of the shooting spree had pressured NPR and the producers of StoryCorps (which is an independent producer) to pull the piece, NPR ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen writes today.

Airing the piece “would be an insult not only to survivors of this particular crime, but to survivors of mass shootings generally,” one survivor of the shooting said. Another said there was no reason to raise the killer’s profile.

NPR’s standards & practices editor, Mark Memmott said, “given the number of mass shootings in the country in recent years, we felt such a conversation was timely. Tough to listen to, certainly, but potentially important to understanding how such tragedies affect those they touch.”

No question it’s timely, but so too is the full context of the story that was missed in the 50 minutes of the interview that was edited out.

Jensen determined the story — and one that aired on All Things Considered several days later — was placed in proper context.

“The complaints e-mailed to the NPR newsroom are always a good reminder that not everyone will agree on what constitutes acceptable journalism. Gibson [the father of the dead student] himself acknowledged that others would be unhappy with the conversation,” she wrote.

But the father had also said he told his story to try to prevent the mass shooting from happening to someone else. Leaving out the elements of Lo’s racism and mental illness, while leaving in the details of the ease of buying a gun in Massachusetts in 1992, make it that much harder to achieve the goal.

About the blogger

Bob Collins retired from Minnesota Public Radio in 2019 after 12 years of writing NewsCut and pointing out to complainants that posts weren’t news stories. A son of Massachusetts, he was a news editor 1992-1998, created the MPR News regional website in 1999, invented the popular Select A Candidate, started several blogs, and every day lamented that his Minnesota Fantasy Legislature project never caught on.

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How does including the killer’s deranged ideology provide useful context to this story?
I fail to see what bearing school papers or racist or homophobic beliefs have on the ease of buying a gun. By themselves these things would never show up on a background check. I certainly don’t see these details about the killer bringing a lot of context to this story. I saw the father’s experience as the focal point of this story.

// I fail to see what bearing school papers or racist or homophobic beliefs have on the ease of buying a gun.

That only is a valid connection if you think the story was about how easy it was to buy a gun. It wasn’t. It was about reconciling a shooting and killing with many components, including the underlying racism and hatred, and the signs of mental illness which were ignored.

// I saw the father’s experience as the focal point of this story.

As it was edited, that’s correct. But the father wasn’t telling his story to tell his story. He was telling his story to keep mass shootings from happening to someone else.

It came out as a feel-good story because that’s the way it was edited. Not because that was the story that would make a difference.

Dan

There’s nothing in the ombudsman’s piece about Lo’s beliefs, or readers complaining about lack of coverage on that topic. They’re mentioned in this post and Bob’s previous post, where stated that they made Lo less sympathetic.

For me, if someone’s brain is truly making them believe God wants them to kill a bunch of people, I’m not as interested in whatever else it had been telling them. It would be different if authorities ended up charging him with a hate crime, if it were someone who otherwise had a grip on reality, and was indoctrinated into beliefs that resulted in a hate (bias-motivated) crime. In this case, though less exotic and more offensive, it seems more along the lines of Jared Loughner’s belief that Pima Community College’s existence was unconstitutional. Ultimately besides the point.